Trumps Presidency 2025

[romad1]

1 hour ago, Sports_Freak said:

If somehow an Iranian terrorist gets thru to cause harm, 2 things will happen. 1. Trump will blame Biden, no matter when the guy came to the U S. And 2. Trump will blame democrats for the TSA funding problem. (He already is blaming them.)

Somehow

[Motown Bombers]

 

[Motown Bombers]

 

[gehringer_2]

Trump says he's 'signing an order' to move funds to pay TSA. I guess this counts as a TACO as TSA is going to get paid which relieves the pressure but the Dems haven't given him anything on the DHS budget. Of course it isn't clear he will have any legal authority for how he gets the money there, but I doubt anyone is going to challenge it.

Edited 22 hours ago by gehringer_2

[guy incognito]

8 hours ago, Sports_Freak said:

If somehow an Iranian terrorist gets thru to cause harm, 2 things will happen. 1. Trump will blame Biden, no matter when the guy came to the U S. And 2. Trump will blame democrats for the TSA funding problem. (He already is blaming them.)

And, as the sun rises in the east, the US MSM will amplify those narratives.

[guy incognito]

[romad1]

9 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

Trump says he's 'signing an order' to move funds to pay TSA. I guess this counts as a TACO as TSA is going to get paid which relieves the pressure but the Dems haven't given him anything on the DHS budget. Of course it isn't clear he will have any legal authority for how he gets the money there, but I doubt anyone is going to challenge it.

I can imagine that Patty Murray is Trump's idea of a humiliating person to lose to.  A woman of a certain age who hasn't warped her appearance and won't fawn over him no matter what.   Also, he probably doesn't even know who she is. 

[Tigerbomb13]

2 hours ago, romad1 said:

I can imagine that Patty Murray is Trump's idea of a humiliating person to lose to.  A woman of a certain age who hasn't warped her appearance and won't fawn over him no matter what.   Also, he probably doesn't even know who she is. 

He won’t call her a “low IQ individual” because she’s not a person of color, but get ready for something on her appearance. 

[gehringer_2]

2 hours ago, romad1 said:

I can imagine that Patty Murray is Trump's idea of a humiliating person to lose to.  A woman of a certain age who hasn't warped her appearance and won't fawn over him no matter what.   Also, he probably doesn't even know who she is. 

I can't wait to see how the Dems somehow snatch defeat from the jaws of victory here.

[Edman85]

For people who fall for the troll.

https://youtu.be/z_brpPpjZ5I?si=gwJWHbB90mWO8jVH

[Motown Bombers]

10 minutes ago, Edman85 said:

For people who fall for the troll.

https://youtu.be/z_brpPpjZ5I?si=gwJWHbB90mWO8jVH

He probably does the squat cobbler. 

[Tigerbomb13]

17 minutes ago, Edman85 said:

For people who fall for the troll.

https://youtu.be/z_brpPpjZ5I?si=gwJWHbB90mWO8jVH

A friend of mine named his cat Colin Robinson 

[oblong]

this fits..... for him the Presidency is a TV show and a storyline gets stale.  

[oblong]

8 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

He probably does the squat cobbler. 

That guy set off the BB universe.

That got Mike in touch with Nacho with got mike with Gus, which got Walt in touch with Gus...

all for some baseball cards

[Tiger337]

14 minutes ago, oblong said:

this fits..... for him the Presidency is a TV show and a storyline gets stale.  

Yeah, it's been fun, but he just wants to declare victory and then move onto his next drama.  He has no long term plan for anything.

[CMRivdogs]

The Republicans made Jimmy Carter sell his farm. Condemned his brother Billy for selling beer. Trump, nada..

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/article/the-definitive-networth-of-donaldtrump/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Quote

Everyone has an opinion, but Forbes has the answer: $6.5 billion, according to our most recent tally, updated in March. Trump added $1.4 billion over the past year, leveraging the presidency for profit. His cryptocurrency ventures, stalled out before the election, exploded after his victory, adding an estimated $1.8 billion to his fortune overall. Another $500 million came in court, where Trump’s legal team succeeded in eliminating a half-billion judgement against him. His once-dormant licensing business surged $400 million, as foreign developers clamored to do business with an American president. Why isn’t he up by more? The value of his shares in Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, decreased $1.3 billion since last year, as the venture bleeds money. Still, with most of Trump’s second term remaining, don’t be surprised if billions more head his way.

And this is the least of his sins...

[Tigerbomb13]

Racist scumbag in chief 

Edited 6 hours ago by Tigerbomb13

[Motown Bombers]

 

[Motown Bombers]

 

[chasfh]

I wonder what our resident Trump supporter makes of this? 🤔

 

I’ve been thinking about the Republican betrayal of the party’s own tradition because of a comment about my work by Glenn Loury, the conservative Black economist. When I was on The Glenn Show in December, he criticized my new book American Contradiction because of my “apparent disregard for the positive contributions of conservative thought and policy to American life.”

Loury and I could probably agree about many historical contributions of principled conservatism, including respect for America’s constitutional tradition and rule of law, skepticism about concentrated governmental power, and support for the independence of civil society and private initiative. I’m sure we’d agree about the importance of patriotism, civility, tolerance, and other values that have been part of a democratic conservatism—democratic in the sense of upholding the democratic “rules of the game,” including free speech and fair elections.

But as Trump has acted with reckless disregard for those principles, Republican leaders, major donors, and corporate supporters have either fallen silent or actively enabled his lawlessness and corruption. That complicity makes you wonder: Were they ever serious about those conservative principles? And since they don’t speak up for them now, what do they stand for?

Since when, for example, was it a conservative principle to concentrate all federal power in the president and deny Congress its constitutional role? How does a party that ostensibly opposes centralized state power square that opposition with the centralization of power in one man?

...

HOW DID REPUBLICANS COME TO BETRAY their own philosophy? A key factor has been the party’s weakness, the fear that it was only getting weaker, and a consequent openness to desperate measures that could enable it to entrench itself in power while it could.

In his 2017 book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, Daniel Ziblatt argues that the strength of conservative parties in the 19th and early 20th centuries determined whether a country followed a stable, settled path to democracy or an unsettled path with authoritarian reversals. Britain’s history is an example of the first; Italy’s, the second. Although Ziblatt’s book is about Europe, the political process he identifies seems to be playing out now in the United States.

“Strong conservative political parties,” Ziblatt argues, “led to a stable long-run path of democratization” for several reasons. Conservatives had “a realistic basis for assuming electoral success” and “the resources that allowed them to sideline their own radicals.” They accepted the “rules of the game” in a democracy because they believed they could win that game or at least keep radicals on the left out of power. But when conservative parties saw themselves as likely to lose, they often turned against democracy. That has been the story of recent American politics. In this case, Republicans have also turned against their old leadership and many of the defining elements in the conservative tradition.

...

In every election in which Trump has run, he has warned that this is Americans’ last chance and that they won’t have a country unless they elect him. If you’ve agreed that America is in extreme danger, it has made perfect sense to repudiate a conservatism that didn’t just fail to prevent the dire trends wrecking the country but contributed to them through its support of pro-immigration and free-trade measures.

Republican elites haven’t cared all that much about Trump’s betrayal of conservatism because of what he hasn’t betrayed: the party’s corporate and class allegiances. Trump’s populism is all in the rhetoric and the scapegoating, not the substance of government. His tax legislation in 2017 and again in 2025 has redistributed income upward; his government appointees side with corporations over workers. Pro-business policy is what many Republicans mean by free-market policy. They are not bothered if the “invisible hand” is replaced by a “conspicuous fist,” as long as that fist generally comes down on their enemies.

Republicans go along with the betrayal of conservatism also because they care more about results than rules, whether those are the rule of law, the rules-based international order, or the rules of civility and decency that Trump routinely flouts. They admire that Trump gets things done and look the other way at how he does it. Although they must know he is corrupt, because he hardly makes a secret of it, he is also delivering the result that matters most to them: power for “us” over “them.”

What Stephen Miller famously said about international politics—“we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”—reflects the mentality now dominating the Republican Party. Some analysts make the mistake of intellectualizing Trump and taking seriously the ideas of the various schools of right-wing thought that compete to provide fig leaves for the worship of power. But as Jan-Werner Müeller has suggested, it’s an error to assume that right-wing political leaders today are “inspired by comprehensive worldviews” or “that far-right parties succeed because voters find their philosophies attractive,” when the leaders are opportunistic and self-interested and “most citizens have no clue” about what right-wing intellectuals are saying.

The driving impulses on the right are old and primitive. As Never Trump conservative intellectuals discovered to their horror, ideas and principles don’t much matter in the party that Trump took over. It’s a world where, as Miller says, strength governs, power governs, force governs—and conservative thought is expected to be loyal and submit.

[gehringer_2]

8 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I wonder what our resident Trump supporter makes of this? 🤔

 

I’ve been thinking about the Republican betrayal of the party’s own tradition because of a comment about my work by Glenn Loury, the conservative Black economist. When I was on The Glenn Show in December, he criticized my new book American Contradiction because of my “apparent disregard for the positive contributions of conservative thought and policy to American life.”

Loury and I could probably agree about many historical contributions of principled conservatism, including respect for America’s constitutional tradition and rule of law, skepticism about concentrated governmental power, and support for the independence of civil society and private initiative. I’m sure we’d agree about the importance of patriotism, civility, tolerance, and other values that have been part of a democratic conservatism—democratic in the sense of upholding the democratic “rules of the game,” including free speech and fair elections.

But as Trump has acted with reckless disregard for those principles, Republican leaders, major donors, and corporate supporters have either fallen silent or actively enabled his lawlessness and corruption. That complicity makes you wonder: Were they ever serious about those conservative principles? And since they don’t speak up for them now, what do they stand for?

Since when, for example, was it a conservative principle to concentrate all federal power in the president and deny Congress its constitutional role? How does a party that ostensibly opposes centralized state power square that opposition with the centralization of power in one man?

...

HOW DID REPUBLICANS COME TO BETRAY their own philosophy? A key factor has been the party’s weakness, the fear that it was only getting weaker, and a consequent openness to desperate measures that could enable it to entrench itself in power while it could.

In his 2017 book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, Daniel Ziblatt argues that the strength of conservative parties in the 19th and early 20th centuries determined whether a country followed a stable, settled path to democracy or an unsettled path with authoritarian reversals. Britain’s history is an example of the first; Italy’s, the second. Although Ziblatt’s book is about Europe, the political process he identifies seems to be playing out now in the United States.

“Strong conservative political parties,” Ziblatt argues, “led to a stable long-run path of democratization” for several reasons. Conservatives had “a realistic basis for assuming electoral success” and “the resources that allowed them to sideline their own radicals.” They accepted the “rules of the game” in a democracy because they believed they could win that game or at least keep radicals on the left out of power. But when conservative parties saw themselves as likely to lose, they often turned against democracy. That has been the story of recent American politics. In this case, Republicans have also turned against their old leadership and many of the defining elements in the conservative tradition.

...

In every election in which Trump has run, he has warned that this is Americans’ last chance and that they won’t have a country unless they elect him. If you’ve agreed that America is in extreme danger, it has made perfect sense to repudiate a conservatism that didn’t just fail to prevent the dire trends wrecking the country but contributed to them through its support of pro-immigration and free-trade measures.

Republican elites haven’t cared all that much about Trump’s betrayal of conservatism because of what he hasn’t betrayed: the party’s corporate and class allegiances. Trump’s populism is all in the rhetoric and the scapegoating, not the substance of government. His tax legislation in 2017 and again in 2025 has redistributed income upward; his government appointees side with corporations over workers. Pro-business policy is what many Republicans mean by free-market policy. They are not bothered if the “invisible hand” is replaced by a “conspicuous fist,” as long as that fist generally comes down on their enemies.

Republicans go along with the betrayal of conservatism also because they care more about results than rules, whether those are the rule of law, the rules-based international order, or the rules of civility and decency that Trump routinely flouts. They admire that Trump gets things done and look the other way at how he does it. Although they must know he is corrupt, because he hardly makes a secret of it, he is also delivering the result that matters most to them: power for “us” over “them.”

What Stephen Miller famously said about international politics—“we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”—reflects the mentality now dominating the Republican Party. Some analysts make the mistake of intellectualizing Trump and taking seriously the ideas of the various schools of right-wing thought that compete to provide fig leaves for the worship of power. But as Jan-Werner Müeller has suggested, it’s an error to assume that right-wing political leaders today are “inspired by comprehensive worldviews” or “that far-right parties succeed because voters find their philosophies attractive,” when the leaders are opportunistic and self-interested and “most citizens have no clue” about what right-wing intellectuals are saying.

The driving impulses on the right are old and primitive. As Never Trump conservative intellectuals discovered to their horror, ideas and principles don’t much matter in the party that Trump took over. It’s a world where, as Miller says, strength governs, power governs, force governs—and conservative thought is expected to be loyal and submit.

Probably not much because he hasn't read anything this long since Penn, if he ever even did then. 

[oblong]

The abandonment of those principals by those in power, I know many intellectuals still cling to it and are never trumpers, but i mean the politicians themselves,tells me the principals were just bull**** to rope in voters for the real battle-the culture war.